St. John sheriff shootings can be traced back to the Smith family camp in a Tennessee trailer park

Adams, Tenn. -- A police car crunched up the trailer park's gravel drive, heading for the family exiled to the far back corner. They were so ornery, so prone to troublemaking that their landlord had moved them there, to lot No. 28A, just to get them out of the way. It was November of last year when the detective...

Adams, Tenn. -- A police car crunched up the trailer park's gravel drive, heading for the family exiled to the far back corner. They were so ornery, so prone to troublemaking that their landlord had moved them there, to lot No. 28A, just to get them out of the way.

It was November of last year when the detective came for 44-year-old Terry Lyn Smith, accused of raping a teenage relative. What she found instead would take her, months later, to St. John the Baptist Parish. A stack of papers she carried from that trailer would help piece together the puzzle of the Smiths, their connection to a Nebraska fugitive and the senseless doctrine that might have driven them to gun down four sheriff's deputies in cold blood.

On Nov. 9, Robertson County, Tenn., Detective Angela Looney arrived at the Smiths' camp, two travel trailers side by side at the Red River Valley Camp in Adams. The Smiths weren't home.

But a skinny redhead bolted from the camper. He ran for the wood line, leaped off a steep wooded bluff and disappeared into the woods.

An old white Buick LaSabre with Nebraska tags sat parked outside. It had been stolen two months earlier, Looney learned, by a skinny, red-headed fugitive named Kyle Joekel, wanted in two states for dealing dope and threatening to kill police officers.

Inside the Smiths' campers, Looney found an arsenal of guns and ammunition and a stack of papers she hoped would lead her to Terry Smith's missing teenage relative. "I started going through it," she said. "And I discovered more than what I went there for."

The documents linked the Smith family to a militant anti-government group called the "sovereign citizens," whose thousands of members recognize no authority higher than their own. They dabble in conspiracy theories and file cryptic lawsuits, protesting the unfairness of taxes and driver's licenses. And sometimes, they spiral into violence.

"The Smiths -- they were arrogant, they didn't care about anybody but themselves," said Jeff Heathcock, their landlord in Tennessee. "I hate to say it, but I could see that ending coming."

'If I see him, I'm gonna kill him'

The mere mention of Terry Smith drives a grizzled old man in north Louisiana to weep, to beat his head against the door frame of his rickety white house, to curse God and Smith and anyone else who will listen. "He's killing me," he sobs.

Richard Skains has long white hair, wears cowboy boots and denim shirts and sinks to his knees at the thought of Smith. His daughter, Chanel Skains, met the man years ago. Her father begged her not to marry him. Smith was manipulative, Skains could see. He brought up his two boys mean, just like him.

But his daughter married Terry Smith anyway, and the two took off to travel from state to state, factory job to factory job.

Skains heard of the child-molestation case in Tennessee and, he says, helped Looney try to find Smith. He begged police to arrest him. "I hate that son of a bitch, and I always did," he said of his son-in-law. "I told the detective: If I see him, I'm gonna kill him. You better catch him before I do."

On the morning of the massacre in the LaPlace trailer park, Chanel Skains ran screaming from her trailer in an effort to protect the deputies, according to witnesses.

"Don't shoot them, don't shoot them!" she wailed, a neighbor said. She threw herself on the fallen deputy as the neighbor watched, begging her husband's son and Kyle Joekel to stop firing. They allegedly shot her in the arm.

She is charged as an accomplice in the shooting of the first deputy in the parking lot.

A week later, Skains' father stood on his lawn, littered with broken bicycles, trash and old tires, and lamented that his daughter -- a good girl, he said -- married such a dangerous man. So dangerous, so mean, Skains said, that somebody should have seen it coming and locked him up long ago.

"Them cops didn't have to die," he said.

Campground troublemakers

Heathcock remembers just three tenantsof the hundreds he had last year. "You don't remember the good people. You just don't," he said. "You remember the troublemakers."

And his threshold for recollection is high: One of the three bad ones, he recalls, stole his canoes, cut them into pieces and sold them a few towns over. Another was caught with a dead prostitute in his trailer. The third -- the Smiths -- was a family so unruly that Heathcock insisted they move to the farthest back corner of the campground's overflow lot.

The campsite's 78 slots were full in November. A Hemlock Semiconductor plant was under construction in nearby Clarksville, Tenn., and itinerant laborers poured into the hills of Robertson County, an hour north of Nashville, looking for work.

Until then, Heathcock and his father had run a sleepy canoe camp, a place for weekend getaways and field trips on the Red River, which snakes along the back edge of the camp's shady main lot. They are more accustomed to nailing flip-flops to their trademark "Tree of Soles" and telling ghost stories to children than they are to housing itinerant laborers. But the Chamber of Commerce had asked that they expand, even temporarily, to give the workers a place to live.

The Heathcocks charged the workers $400 a month in rent and, for the most part, left them alone.

The Smith family arrived in the summer of 2011, a few months before the police came, he said. They'd come from a brief stint at a trailer park in Carrollton, Ky., where they caused no trouble, the Sheriff's Office there and trailer park owners told The Times-Picayune.

Terry Smith was a welder; his boys were laborers and pipe fitters. Heathcock is not sure if they found work with a contractor, or if they only hoped to.

Not long after they arrived, a neighbor threw a bag of trash into the bed of the wrong gray pickup. It was meant for the landlord's truck, but he put it into Terry Smith's by mistake. Smith responded by ripping the bag open in a screaming rage, and sprinkling its rotting contents onto the neighbor's front stoop.

He tossed broken-down appliances, beer cans and trash into his neighbors' lots. He'd park his truck in the middle of the road and heckle anyone who asked him to move it.

They were just little boys on Feb. 8, 2001, when Terry Smith allegedly drove their mother, his wife of 15 years, to a game preserve near their hometown of Bastrop, in the northeast corner of Louisiana.

He pulled a pistol from his pocket, pointed it at her head, then his, and threatened to kill them both if she left him, according to the police report. She promised she never would.

Hours later, after he'd driven her home and fallen asleep, his gun tucked under his pillow, his wife escaped from their tiny white house, on a street crammed with small, disheveled houses on the outskirts of town.

That night, he followed his wife to a neighbor's home and grabbed her through the door, but the neighbor, a woman, held Smith's wife in a bear hug, dragging her back inside. She called police.

Two months later, his wife wrote the court. She asked the judge to drop the charges against her husband. "We have reconciled and are back together as husband and wife," she wrote.

But she did, in the end, leave Terry Smith. She filed for divorce in September 2001, according to court records. They agreed on a custody arrangement for their two boys: Terry Smith took the eldest, Brian, then 13, and his ex-wife took Derrick, then 11.

A detective who, years later, would try to make some sense of the Smiths has come to believe that Brian remained his father's favorite, his father's soldier. Derrick Smith was more fumbling: eager to please but prone to failure.

Rap sheet started early

The Smith brothers' records at the Morehouse Parish courthouse in Bastrop began before either was old enough to buy cigarettes.

The father worked mostly odd jobs, said Morehouse Parish Sheriff Mike Tubbs, at a paper factory, for a bail bondsman, as a gunsmith.

In 2005, when he was 17, Brian allegedly stole $155 from his mother's purse and had two bags of pot in his pocket when he was caught. At 18, he was pulled over by police, with a joint and a pint of gin in the floorboard of his Chevy Blazer, the officer wrote.

Derrick, at 17, denied stealing a credit card from a man's pocket. Rather, he said, he picked it up off a driveway and tried to use it Internet shopping.

"I ain't talking to none of y'all," Derrick Smith shouted at police on another occasion after he was allegedly caught ransacking a house for prescription drugs. Then he tried to smuggle joints and a copper crack pipe into the Morehouse Parish Jail, according to court records.

In 2009, Brian and Derrick Smith, 21 and 18, kicked in the door of their mother and stepfather's house, broke into a safe and stole 200 pills, according to court records. Their mother told police that she'd seen her son, Derrick, the day before with an assault rifle. He tested positive for marijuana and cocaine.

"It was pretty common to see a sheriff's car here back then," said Genie Daniell, who lived next door to their mother and stepfather's home, where both boys lived at least part of the time.

They were loud; they hollered and revved their trucks down the road, she said. She called the sheriff several times herself. Once, she recalls, the boys banged on her door at 2 a.m., demanding they be allowed to use her phone.

The boys broke into another neighbor's truck and stole his gun, his radio, even a stack of mail. The neighbor simply walked across the lawn, opened their garage and took back his pistol.

Terry Smith dressed in camouflage, tied a bandana around his head and pointed a pistol at a camera in a Facebook post in December 2011.Ted Jackson, staff photographer

Daniell said she watched in disgust as the house next door -- once a sturdy brick home -- accumulated junk in the yard and grew muck in the pool out back. Eventually, the boys left with their father. Their stepfather died in a car accident, and their mother remarried and moved away. She did not respond to requests for comment.

Now the house sits empty, with broken windows, trash in the driveway and the pool filled with brush and muck. It is still owned by the family, Daniell said, but none of them had been there in years.

Spewing hate on social media

Terry Smith dressed in camouflage, tied a bandana around his head and pointed a pistol at a camera. He had a tough-guy grimace on his face, and his finger on the trigger. "For all you HATER's see the snake eye," he wrote as a caption to the Facebook photo he posted on Dec. 27 last year.

On his Myspace profile, according to the Anti-Defamation League, Smith listed his heroes as white supremacist Randy Weaver, who led the 10-day standoff with federal agents at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992; self-proclaimed prophet and accused child molester David Koresh, who led the Branch Davidians religious sect to their fiery death in Waco, Texas; and Alex Jones, a radio talk-show host, filmmaker and conspiracy theorist, who has accused the federal government of instigating the Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Terry Smith's oldest son, Brian, took to social media to chronicle his love affair with a wood-handled assault rifle in dozens of photographs.Ted Jackson, staff photographer

Terry Smith's oldest son, Brian, also took to social media to chronicle his love affair with a wood-handled assault rifle in dozens of photographs. Usually shirtless, Smith posed with the gun in a kitchen, in a bathroom, in a hotel room. He flashed gang signs with the gun; he fanned $100 bills alongside it. He tied a red bandana to its barrel and held it up for the camera, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

In one photograph, he lounged on a bed with his girlfriend, Brittney Keith, now an accused co-conspirator. Both flashed West Side gang signs and pointed pistols, with a red bandana arranged between them.

Derrick Smith's Facebook photos show a skinny boy with a sunken face. He also flashed gang signs and wore red bandanas, but he held no guns and, unlike his big brother, kept his shirt on in self-portraits. On May 18, he took a photo of a hearse from the window of a car on the highway and borrowed his father's language for the caption: "This is where haters ride!"

A fateful meeting

The teenage girl disappeared from the trailer park in Adams last fall. Detective Looney thinks a Smith relative hurried her across state lines to keep her quiet.

She had lived with them, in their pair of dirty travel trailers, until she told two other children that Terry Smith, then 43, had been forcing her to have sex with him, according to a search warrant filed in Robertson County, Tenn., Circuit Court.

He had demanded she take nude photographs of herself and send them to him, the warrant says. One of the children told police that she had seen one of the pictures her friend sent Smith, preceded by a text message: "Send me a picture of you now or your gonna get your ass beat," she told police it said.

When the detective arrived at the campground on Nov. 9, she carried with her the search warrant for child pornography, stored in computers or phones or magazines, along with any documentation that might lead her to the child. She did not expect to find the arsenal or the stack of anti-government literature. Nor did she expect Kyle Joekel to sprint from the trailer -- spooked by the paranoia of someone on the lam.

He'd wandered into the campground just 18 days before, Heathcock remembers. "He wasn't looking for trouble here," the campground's owner said. "He was in survival mode: really skinny, malnourished, desperate. He was willing and eager to work."

Heathcock hired Joekel, at $80 a day, to put a new tin roof on the camp's office. It was grueling work, Heathcock said, and a half-dozen people he'd hired to do earlier it had walked away before they'd finished. Joekel, though, said little as he worked, and returned each morning.

Heathcock suspects that Joekel met the Smiths over beers one evening in the camp's overflow space, a makeshift parking lot towering 100 feet above the main camp, up a steep wooded bluff.

Heathcock got the impression Joekel was a follower, impressionable and easy to reel in. The Smiths, he believes, became Joekel's outlaw family, bonded in blood and guns and a shared distaste for authority. When the law came for the patriarch, the Smiths had to run, and Joekel had nowhere else to go. So he figured he might as well run with them, Heathcock thinks.

They all snuck back in the next day, long enough to hook their trailers to their trucks and haul them away. Then the Smiths and Joekel, once again, slipped away.

Heathcock didn't know where they were headed. At the time, he didn't much care, so long as they stayed gone. But Looney kept looking.

She issued a bulletin through the Tennessee Fusion Center, declaring Terry Smith wanted for questioning in a child sex-abuse case. He had a history that wove through a half-dozen states, the bulletin warned, and was affiliated with a militant organization prone to domestic terrorism. He should be considered dangerous.

A half a year later, a hitchhiker thumbing a ride on a desolate stretch of highway in north Louisiana would offer a similar warning about the Smiths. The family, he told yet another sheriff -- this one 600 miles from Tennessee -- had moved into the back of a trailer park in their town.